Commentary by Walter Shaw Sparrow

He has done one set of water-colour impressions, numbering about
fifty, that may be described, without extravagance, as tragic and
epical. In 1908, after the earthquake, Brangwyn went to Messina,
as we have learnt from a few of his etchings, and these fifty watercolours are the history of his experiences. Two Messina sketches
were seen as colour-plates in my earlier book; and the whole series
proved, with mingled glow and gloom, pathos and satire, grandeur
and meanness, that men of a day among the ruins were often about
as foolish as moths are at night when they see naked flames. Now
and then gamblers and thieves were busy, and some other fools made
themselves into beasts with drink and revel. Contrasts between
prayer and levity jostled one another, as if comic songs at a deathbed would enforce attention, like deep harmony. Below the
Duomo, itself partly a ruin, and awed as by Dante, little busy men
would pray sometimes, and at other times would care not a jot,
seemingly, that Nature had ruled again over human pride, destroying
with terrible speed what men had put up with slow pains. Human
vice remained, and gregarious custom, with half-hours of emotional
prayer, and some other ordinary good behaviour.
Thus, in Brangwyn's historic water-colours, sketched at a white heat
among sinister ruins, Messina in one aspect seems to be what Chaucer
writes about drunkenness — a horrible sepulture of man's reason; more
fate-haunted, of course, since earthquake has made an epic of desolation where many a year of good material work done by man is injured,
or broken, or smashed. Yet we cannot say that human folly seems
to have a longer tenure of life than human thought and handicraft,
for almost all we know about many a people and many a tongue is
learnt from what seems to be the first and most fragile of man's inventions, pottery, fictile art, like those clay vases wherein primitive
tribes buried their enshrined dead. But yet it is imperative that
painters, like other historians, should gather from disaster all that
Brangwyn learnt both of nature and of human nature amid the
wreckage, grand and mean, at Messina.
[Prints and Drawings of Brangwyn, 239-40]

Formatting and text by George P. Landow.
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Bibliography

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Prints and Drawings of Frank Brangwyn with Some Other Phases of His Art. London: John Lane, 1919. Internet Archive version of a copy in the Ontario College of Art. Web. 28 December 2012.

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Prints and Drawings of Frank Brangwyn with Some Other Phases of His Art. London: John Lane, 1919. Internet Archive version of a copy in the Ontario College of Art. Web. 28 December 2012.